The investigation of interregional imbalance comparison in Turkey

Since natural and social resources are not distributed evenly in the world, socio-economic developments shows discrepancies in terms of place and time. This leads to the differences of development status among the countries socio-economicly and cause them to be categorized as developed, developing and underdeveloped countries.Although the developmental discrepancies among the countries and regions go back to the ?mercanhthalism period?, it started to become a part of the countries? agenda as a national problem after the period of industry revolution. While the fundamental causes for development were the factors such as transportation facilities, productive fields, mineral resources, and the way of administration prior to industry revolution; the motor power for development of countries and regions following the industry revoltion was the rationales of industrial assets. While the countries who realized the industry revolution were progressing rapidly from the industrial point of view, the unindustrialized countries became the colonies of the industrialized countries due to the underdevelopment. Industry revolution, 1740 Capitulations and Free Trade act signed in 1838 caused The Otoman Empire to become an open market of the indusrtrialized countries due to the failure of indusrtrialization.As can be understood from these explanations that The Turkish Republic has inherited a very weak economic structure. All the policies conducted in that term was the reactionary policies to the previous period to overcome the unbalances emerged at that period. From 1923 to date including the the period with plans, the basic goal targeted was to vitalise the national economy and to overcome the socio-economic unbalances by integrating the country to the West.The subject of investigation and the variables consisted of the post-1980 period data point out that Marmara, Central Anatolian and Egean regions has become the main areas due to their historic advantages where the economic activities are focused on year by year and led these regions to become developed socio-economicly. In contrast, Black Sea, Eastern Anatolian and South-Eastern Anatolian regions has been observed as the undeveloped regions of Turkey and the regions showing low progress level because of the certain historical and socio-economic problems. On the other hand, the Meditereanean region was identified as an avarege region in between socio-economicly (developed versus undeveloped) when all socio-economic variables are investigated.Keywords : 5 Year Development Plan, Interregional Imbalance, Regional Development Agency, Industry Revolution, Socio-Economic Imbalance.